The problem is they deliver stuff that works the same way stuff worked 50 years ago. There just isn't any room in physics and engineering to allow the massive amounts of energy the overoptimistic delusions of the Space Aged promised.

Too bad there's still no destination for people, eh? It's still a vacuum, it's still a radiation-blasted hell, and it's still empty. Low Earth Orbit is not "space"... Too bad we still need massive amounts of material to build rockets, too bad there's no new physics of propulsion... Why are the dead dreams of bygone eras so important to a small segment of rich, white middle-aged geeks?

What happened to the 1997 Japanese space hotel? Oh yeah, nothing. What's going on with the PG&E space based solar power? Oh yeah, nothing. Space is dead. None of the delusions about orbital ball bearing factories, commuting to the office on the Moon or retiring on Mars make a shred of sense. The two most powerful nations on Earth entered a no-holds-barred contest to get people on the Moon, and even THEY, at the PEAK of their power, weren't able to sustain it.

But somehow, CEO and his magical sidekick, the Free Market, will do it? It's time for a reality check. Metal tubes filled with chemicals don't compensate for the basic fact that people arent' meant for space, there's nothing IN space, and space is so enormously bigger than anything we can conceive... Think we'll colonize the universe with balding middle-aged apes with bad eyesight? Where is the free market life extension effort to go with the size of the universe?

It's very simple. Even here on Earth, where EVERYONE and EVERYTHING is, we couldn't even sustain Concorde. Where are these magical rich people just waiting in line to shower money at the private space buff(oon)s? After the novelty of going nowhere wears off, then what? It wore off already in 1972. It won't change.

So the fat-cats will be able to take their mistresses on a vacation where they can be pretty sure their wife won't find them.

That market will last about 6 months, until the novelty wears off, and word gets around that zero-g is bloody uncomfortable. Even once the vomiting/motion-sickness phase wears off, you spend the rest of your 'vacation' with a bloated head, feeling like you have a minor head cold. And I suspect the much-anticipated space sex will turn out to be more comical than erotic.

The Space Shuttle could have been considerably more efficient, had the budget for it not been slashed many times over. Nuclear propulsion was entirely possible 50 years ago, but this thing called an Arms Race made it politically a no-go. Had there been a more enlightened attitude on both sides of the curtain, we'd have colonies on Saturn's moons by now, never mind Mars. Ion drives make extended-mission space probes a real possibility, but the lack of isotopes to make nuclear energy cells (due to a total lack of decent nuclear facilities in the US) means that the probes will still have propellant long after the batteries are dead.

Ok, launch systems. ARLA is a real possibility for low-mass satellites. TAR is a real possibility for larger systems. NASA is experimenting with ski-jump assisted launchers but I doubt that will go anywhere - Congress keeps slashing the budget. Blended-Wing Body aircraft could have been released by NASA by 2010, but Congress - guess what! - slashed the budget and the program was killed off.

NASA could do a hell of a lot better, but it can't do it for free. The current rocket program is a mistake - NASA is an R&D facility, a discovery facility, not a mass production facility. Multiply NASA's budget by 10 or 20, build it a dedicated reactor for producing the necessary isotopes for batteries, devolve it as a quango so it has less political interference, and you'll see what it is capable of. All without breaking a single law of physics.

Nuclear propulsion was entirely possible 50 years ago, but this thing called an Arms Race made it politically a no-go.

More the lack of an arms race, really. NERVA was pretty much ready to go, but had no use for ICBMs: it was aimed squarely at a mission to Mars. A very expensive, not particularly-useful-in-competing-with-the-USSR mission to Mars.

A small base on Saturn would make controlling things like space probes and rover-type landers viable. The delay is otherwise simply too great. It makes it possible to custom-build experiments in a way that can't be done on Earth - again due to latency. It also makes it possible to rig up experiments that are too fragile to launch from Earth's gravity well.

Have you ever read about the few airborne nuclear propulsion tests they did? Running a small research reactor in a plane, the small amount of shielding they could put in it left the aircraft so radioactive from neutron activation that they couldn't get near it for weeks.

Plus, the plutonium for RTGs is some REALLY nasty stuff. It would be a lot safer if we could put that reactor in lunar orbit - since the RTGs are only used on deep-space missions, and we're getting pretty good at remote processing of fuels,

Killing Orion/Ares is something that should have happened for a whole bunch of reasons, and I'm glad that it was canned. It was a program grossly over budget and behind schedule and was something that should never have been proposed in the first place. It didn't even accomplish the primary goals of the endeavor, which was to keep as much of the Space Shuttle infrastructure (aka the assembly plants and spare parts delivery queues) going after the retirement of the Shuttle program.

For myself, I think the DIRECT [wikipedia.org] approach is something that should have been done, and it might have even been able to use the Orion spacecraft. Indeed the Orion design was deliberately changed to make sure it couldn't fly on DIRECT or on existing EELVs like the Atlas V or Delta IV.

Really, the Ares program completely missed the objective of keeping Americans in space and only accomplished one real goal: keeping members of congress happy because money from that project flowed into their districts. Their main gripe is that the flow of money stopped, and unemployed constituents who were sucking off of the government teat are not happy voters when that flow of money ends. That doesn't justify why any other member of congress needs to support that program to continue other than to support their own crazy form of pork.

Certainly killing the Ares rockets has done nothing to American science, and indeed it might have even helped out.

SpaceX have had only a single successful commercial flight, and even then that was somebody being willing to take a risk on putting their payload onboard a testing flight. I'm happy to be hopeful, and I see no reason why they can't in time develop into a company with a record for reliability, but it's premature to say that they deliver stuff that works.

I agree with you to a point. SpaceX has been able to prove they can get stuff "up there" in one piece, and that they can nail orbital parameters that they set out to achieve.

This next year (2012) is going to be the big year for SpaceX to put up or shut up. Either they are going to have several successful launches or they are going to have several spectacular failures including their collapse as a company. Assuming they get the NASA COTS demos completed, they will certainly have a proven track record including to paying customers.

There are several commercial customers that are taking a "wait and see" attitude toward SpaceX, and presuming these flights are successful there are more flights that will go onto their backlog of flights [spacex.com]. It is also worth telling that SpaceX has already sold more flights this past year to new customers than all other spaceflight companies in the world, including the Chinese, Russians, Indians, and ESA combined. That should say something which should be worthy of notice, and also tell a sad tale of the incredibly small market that there currently is for commercial spaceflight. It isn't a completely dead market, but it is still incredibly small... and I'm talking about people willing to pay for telecom satellites and other proven commercial markets for spaceflight.

Seriously, who ever posted this preceding post is simply clueless about what SpaceX has accomplished. Yes, they had a couple of spectacular failures with the Falcon 1, including one "loss of vehicle". Three flights that were clearly "test flights" that had some problems followed by two flights of the Falcon 1 that were clear successes including a delivered commercial payload. That isn't even a "partial" success but a complete success and the satellite is still in use.

I am guessing it is the same people who have informed you about the Burbank studio where the Apollo 11 landing took place at. Please try to convince me otherwise, but I have to take the word of an AC as just a crank who is clueless about life and thinks grand conspiracy theories rule the universe.

Yes, I do realize that the stuff you see in the publicity reels about the landing is from the test drop that was done from a helicopte

First of all, the Falcon 9 has flown twice. The first time there was a problem when the second stage separated, and the dummy cargoe ended up in a lower than intended orbit. But it made it to orbit. And of course it crash landed because it had no landing systems. It was a mock up of a dragon module. It was only there to give the rocket something to lift.

On the second flight, it lifted a first generation dragon module into the correct orbit. The dragon then re-entered the atmosphere and splashed down. The flight went nominally, it and it's cargoe were recovered. This was the flight NASA paid for, and Space X delivered it.

They had a secondary objective of recovering the first stage of their rocket, but the first stage burned up as it re-entered the atmosphere. That was not something NASA had paid for, it is an experimental program SpaceX is undertaking to try to further reduce the cost of their launch system.

I know I'd go work for Elon in a heartbeat - free if I could afford to. There's a man with brass ones, and my idea of a visionary. This is a strong statement from a guy like me, a serial-offender CEO of engineering firms. I just never made as much money to go big as he did, myself....

If SpaceX gets humans back on the moon, then more power to them. Currently, though, the notion that "private sector will solve all!" seems like more of an ideological excuse than an honest assessment of what the U.S. is capable of in space.

I'm starting to think we haven't gone to the moon since 1972 because we forgot how.

I'd agree. Space is experimental and there's bugger all anything outside of geostationary with any commercial value at this time. It's an area where governments have the cash to do things that no-one else can, though if you want outside involvement then I'd suggest throwing that cash at eccentrics, inventors (though not innovators) and geeks - the people who are capable of coming up with new ideas.

Iridium is able to make a small profit after admittedly a financial disaster over the previous decade. The next generation satellites look like they will finally have some real bandwidth as well.... being flown up into space on Falcon 9 rockets no less, so it looks like Elon Musk has that market cornered as well.

Really, commercial spaceflight currently falls into the following categories:

Telecommunications - including GEO orbits and stuff like Iridium. If anything this is a growth industry, and the stuff going into space has even become larger over time where it is definitely a growth market for heavy lift. It is also a pretty saturated market, however, with most of the players in this market segment very well known to each other. Another Ted Turner type could emerge here, but not likely. It is a multi-billion dollar industry though and something not to ignore.

Orbital reconnaissance - while government customers are painfully obvious, there are numerous commercial customers as well. Some of them are famous and can be found with Google Earth, but there are other commercial groups that have specialized remote sensing applications including agriculture and mining industries which aggressively use satellite data and will pay billions (collectively) for the data that these satellites produce. If mining leases come up, you had better believe that satellite views with different sequences of color filters (including multiple UV and IR filters) have been applied on potential plots to help identify potential mineral deposits. Included with this is weather observation data that has a similar kind of value... and isn't strictly GEO either.

Remote sensing sort of a combination of the two previous areas but with the need to have something on the ground. Basically this is sending data from very remote areas to be collected in a systematic fashion and sent to a central data warehouse. Some of this is now being done over fiber optic lines, but satellite transmission of data still serves the needs in many areas. Some surprising "customers" including Wal-Mart and other retailers, but it is a mainstay for mining and petroleum extraction. It certainly wouldn't be out of the question for a dedicated satellite being used to handle very sensitive information from remote sensing equipment, and having companies being willing to pay for the launch of a multi-million dollar satellite for the value of that information.

Navigation - obviously the governments of the world are heavily invested into this area of space economic activity, but the fact that there are huge economic benefits to nations that have space-based navigation systems is certainly a market that can arguably be called "commercial" as well. There is no possible way I could ever imagine the U.S. Congress ever cutting funding to the GPS constellation, although if that ever were to happen I would expect a commercial replacement to happen in a very short period of time. It certainly fits on a list of commercial enterprises directly related to space and utterly depend upon space-based assets. It is also a market for launchers as well.

To add to these areas, two other very likely and emergent areas of commercial spaceflight can be summed up in the two following areas:

Hypersonic Courier Services - if you have a package that absolutely positively has to get somewhere by yesterday (literally a possibility across the international date line), a very high speed courier service can be very beneficial. There are most definitely companies who would be willing to pay for a courier service that has the current rough price point per kilogram that spaceflight has at the moment (about $10k per kg).... if only it was dependable and regular between destinations. The trick here is to get a regular flight service going where you can be certain as to when something launches to within an hour or so rather than the current rough prediction of the neighborhood of several months of rel

Agreed, especially on the hypersonic. But to do that, you'd need one of the higher-speed waveriders and a working scramjet. Currently, nobody has the former - NASAs projects keep getting killed - and the Australians are the only ones with the latter after NASA's project got killed. I don't see private enterprise being willing to step in and complete a technology Congress has deemed profitless. For starters, if they tried and failed, their shareholders would roast them with garlic butter precisely because Co

Who the fuck marked this as insightful? You really aren't serious are you?

There's plenty to be found on the moon. We should be investing in the tech to get there cheaply, so we can start exploiting the assets around us and stop gouging holes in our own home rock when there is a universe of materials floating around us. We have to evolve out of our reptile brained thinking at least long enough to understand "the big picture" and get moving on it.

One thing you don't understand is that exploiting space will make little difference to earth's population. The human race will simply become 7 billion and growing plus whatever is in space in addition, in fact, earths population may possibly grow faster while earth is a direct beneficiary of those resources.

Note that I don't necessarily share your pessimism about population issues either.

The more the merrier. But unless we find more resources, such as in space, this planet isn't going to sustain this many damn people. Especially as they wish to start raising their lifestyle up the carbon footprint scale. We are dragging our feet at planetary atmosphere scrubbing technology. It's right in front of us in our bongs, but we haven't been smart enough to realize it. Hemp will scrub the shit out of carbon in our atmosphere, give us petroleum, feed us, give us construction materials, paper, clothes

Physics (gravity, heat dissipation, fluid dynamics, structural integrity, physical properties of aluminum and rubber) and chemistry (unless there are some easily transportable fuels and oxidizers in some lab somewhere that have more energy and less toxicity and cost than kerosene and LOX ) aren't going to change any time soon. Fiction writers hand wave over a STUPENDOUS amount of complexity.

there is a universe of materials floating around us

Except that1) it's REALLY FSCKING FAR AWAY,2) bathed in high-energy radiation,3) we're at the bottom of a deep gravity well,4) surrounded by a friction-inducing atmosphere, and5) require on a consistent basis food and a pretty narrow range of temperature and oxygen and nitrogen partial pressures.

Fiction writers obviously do that, but engineers often lack balls and imagination. I think it stems from the inherent need to be "right" that comes from the field. You obviously can't be another drone, or lackey or salary slave and expect to pave new frontiers. Nor can you expect the corporate mindset or government mindset to produce it either. You have to get tired of waiting for it to happen and just do it yourself. Of course we are lacking sorely of people of that freedom, and caliber.

It all depends on what you want to accomplish. I would dare say that the "problem" of getting to low-Earth orbit (LEO, aka what the Space Shuttle did and what most other spacefaring countries are currently doing) is a "solved problem" and really something that needs to be handed over to private companies completely. Back in the 1950's, there still was doubt it could be done at all or at least reliably done. That isn't even a remote issue any more. LEO is hardly even a frontier any more and there are some serious traffic issues in terms of dealing with what is up there because so much stuff [wikipedia.org] is up there at the moment.

Turning over actual launches to private companies seems like a very wise use of tax dollars, and try to set up the means for private individuals (or companies) to be able to launch their own payloads on the same vehicles.... just like is done currently with commercial aviation. The U.S. government often does buy flights on commercial carriers or even individual seats on regular commercial routes. Why can't that same business model be applied to spaceflight if you can get similar economies of scale?

As for going to the Moon, the notion that you have a disintegrating pyramid that absolutely must start on the ground here on the Earth is the first idea that needs to be killed. Once you give up that notion, it becomes much, much easier to design a vehicle and system which can go from LEO to the Moon and back. We certainly don't need a multi-billion (with a giant "B") dollar boondoggle [wikipedia.org] that is only really designed to keep rocket engineers busy in key congressional districts that does more of the same and even duplicating services being done by private companies.

It isn't really so much we forgot how to go to the Moon, but that the cost of doing so with this massive disintegrating pyramid is so huge that designing a unique vehicle to accomplish that one task is cost prohibitive. The circumstances which created the original Apollo program won't be duplicated and currently don't exist either. We (as a country or even as a species) aren't in a particular hurry to get to the Moon either.

I think part of the problem is that Apollo didn't make good use of the capability to get to the moon. There was some useful science but only one of the men who walked on the surface was a scientist, and it seems like no thought was given to commercial opportunities at all. To be fair a lot of that is due to simply not knowing enough about the moon or about the potential for commercial operations like mining, and the limits of the technology of the time making long term or robotic exploration impossible.

There was an attempt to leverage the engineering and technology developed under the Apollo program into something incredibly useful. It was called the Apollo Applications Program [wikipedia.org], of which only the space station portion ever got developed. Today that is known as Skylab.

If you want to see a NASA that could have been instead of what actually was, that Wikipedia article should at least give you a good glimpse into a very interesting alternate history of what NASA and America could have been doing.

It's not really about commercial vs private, they've framed it that way to simplify the debate for the public. This is about fixed firm contacts versus cost plus contracts. And if the early results are any indication, fixed firm is much better.

Only one attempt [wikipedia.org] has been made under the COTS [wikipedia.org] program. And and it was a success. Your subject line would have the reader believe that there were 9 unsuccessful attempts. Both flights of the Falcon 9 [wikipedia.org] to date have been successful (the first of which was not even under COTS).

I would suggest that perhaps you meant to include the Falcon 1 [wikipedia.org] (even though no Falcon 1 flights have been part of COTS), but clearly we would then need to increase the total number of succ

By the way, I am well aware of the downfalls of Cost Plus contracts. I make most of my money working under them. Suits love them because they allow them more control over the work being done, which means more power for them.

That's why I hope that COTS and SpaceX will be able to show that Fixed Firm contracts are better and put an end (hopefully) to the insanity of how government contracting is typically done today. And so far, they're doing pretty well.

Currently, though, the notion that "private sector will solve all!" seems like more of an ideological excuse than an honest assessment of what the U.S. is capable of in space.

Not a lot of people realize this, but -all- DOD launches and all non-Shuttle NASA launches, plus of course all commercial satellite launches, have been on privately-built rockets for quite a few years now. This includes multi-billion dollar satellites critical to national security. It's somewhat nonsensical to have a separate government-designed/operated launcher just for manned US launches, especially when NASA hasn't successfully developed a launch vehicle in the past 30 years (plenty of failures, though).

The private sector is at least trying to pick up the slack, give them a break. Our "government" has turned out to be a bunch of whores in this "slash and burn" capitalist environment. We need industry in America or we will not be able to produce pop bottle rockets if we keep going. Wall Street has turned into the new Vegas, and "fuck 'em all" financial practices have rendered us a nation of fast food industries. Face it, we are seriously screwed.

If SpaceX gets humans back on the moon, then more power to them. Currently, though, the notion that "private sector will solve all!" seems like more of an ideological excuse than an honest assessment of what the U.S. is capable of in space.

I'm starting to think we haven't gone to the moon since 1972 because we forgot how.

We haven't gotten back to the moon because of a lack of a compelling reason to do so..Many people forget that the mission of Apollo was not to chart new frontiers and advance science. It was to beat the Russians to the first manned landing on the moon, a mission accomplished in 1969. Once that was done the public perception quickly changed to the idea that Apollo was no longer needed, hence the quick fall off of interest in the moon flights after the brief drama of Apollo 13.

I generally see Mark Whittington as being the chief cheerleader for the "let's do Apollo again" school of space flight. There's nothing wrong with that, except that NASA has pretty definitively proven over a period of decades that it's too bureaucratic, too sclerotic, and too much organized as a patronage/jobs organization to do anything big in manned space flight. Even were that not the case, it's a shame that Whittington continually elides the fact that the commercial space contracts — both cargo and crew — only pay out when specific milestones are achieved, and they pay fixed amounts for those milestones. In other words, this isn't Solyndra, where money is just thrown down the drain with no expectation of success; that actually better describes NASA's normal manned space flight program than it does the commercial space companies.

I think Chaikin's right, and that the entrepreneurial spirit that characterized NASA in the 1960s now resides in the private space companies. And as a bitter critic of the Obama administration on pretty much every other point, I nonetheless have to say that this is the one area where they've definitely improved on the Republicans.

>except that NASA has pretty definitively proven over a period of decades that it's too bureaucratic, too sclerotic, and too much organized as a patronage/jobs >organization to do anything big in manned space flight.
Your criticisms may be valid, but you're conclusion is absurd. The state-sponsored behemoths of the USA, Russia, and China are the *only* organizations that have definitely proven it can do big things in manned space flight. I don't count flying a rocket-powered plane really high as

"Name the only organization to have sent a man on an extra-orbital space flight"

That organization hasn't done that for nearly 40 years. Most of the people at that organization who did do that have retired or passed away. You simply can't keep milking your long past accomplishments forever. You pretty much have to stop when none of the people who did the great things is in that organization now.

If you saw the feeble attempt that was the first test launch of Ares, or watched every other one of NASA's failed attempts at a new launcher design since the Space Shuttle you seriously have to question if NASA can ever build a successful new launcher. The Space Shuttle, though it had some positives, was a pretty flawed one too and its over 30 years old.

SpaceX may ultimately fail but a lot of people are really pegging their hopes on it being the best shot the U.S. has of actually leading and innovating in space again.

If you've actually watched NASA, Boeing or Lockheed over the last 40 years you can be pretty confident they've just been milking Congress to perpetuate a high tech jobs program, while feeding the states and districts of a few poweful Congressmen who are adept at doling out port. They seem to have very little fire in their belly to do ANYTHING interesting, innovative or risky. When youÂclosely couple that with a political system that completely changes direction every 4-8 years you have a system designed to go nowhere. SpaceX is at least somewhat decoupled from all that BS.

The main restriction to deep space travel is cost. When the estimate for a round-trip mission to Mars ended up being somewhere close to $100 billion (IMHO a gross underestimation for a government program of that scope), there is a reason why Congress had a huge sticker shock and decided to dump the whole program, especially for just a "flags and footprints" kind of mission to the Red Planet. Going back to the Moon seems even more pointless.

SpaceX seems pretty pragmatic about their funding. They are going after as much of the existing satellite launch business as they can get, take what they can from NASA for ISS support or other government launches and use the money to build both cheaper small launchers for LEO and cheaper big launchers that would enable deep space missions.

Not sure if SpaceX cares about Moon missions or asteroids, Elon seems pretty focused on Mars as his real deep space goal. I imagine he is hoping that if he has off the shelf launchers that make Mars viable the missions will come (i.e. some government(s) will see the possibilities and fund actual missions). This is as opposed to now where no one has anything that will makes Mars feasible so it never gets off the drawing board. If you are waiting for NASA to build a heavy launcher you will be waiting forever it would appear. All that buearacracy cares about is keeping the jobs program going in the home states of Senators Shelby, Nelson, Hutchinson and Hatch.

Its kind of out there but opening a whole new planet to habitation would seem to offer future economic incentives. Also as we exhaust our mineral reserves moving mineral rich asteroids in to earth orbit and mining them also would have huge economic payoffs. Someone in China wrote a paper on this recently. One asteroid could yield trillions of dollars in returns... though it could also crash the price of the commodities involved if, for example, someone found an asteroid laden with gold.

Consider this.SpaceX designed and built Falcon 9 for under 20% of what it would have cost NASA.

The proposed new launcher from NASA would cost 30 billion over the next decade, and provide 2 launches, totalling around a hundred tons.If the money was spent purchasing Falcon 9 launches, you would get 7500 tons in LEO.

With the development of Falcon heavy, that rises to 20000 tons.If you can't bootstrap a decent space industry with what in an earlier age would be a respectable mass for an aircraft carrier - you're doing it wrong.And this assumes SpaceX fails in their goal of making the rockets partially reusable, which will significantly lower costs.The fuel is under a percent of the costs.

It wasn't hard to recruit junior engineers with the following proposal: Do you want to spend the rest of your career building power point presentations and attending conferences, or do you want to work on a clean sheet engine design and actually fly stuff into space?

It doesn't take much brain power to figure out which career path will help you out both professionally and intellectually.

BTW, SpaceX didn't raid just JPL, but also Lockheed-Martin, Boeing, and several other major aerospace companies. They also did a pretty good job of raiding the NASA astronaut corps (as have some other private commercial spaceflight companies) and have been picking up other people along the way that are also extremely talented, including some recent college graduates who also like working for companies that have an active production floor. The manufacturing plant at El Segundo is as busy as any factory was during the glory years of the Cold War when Atlas missiles (and others) were being built for ICBMs. SpaceX right now has more engines in its production queue than all other countries of the Earth combined, with an estimated completion of about one engine each week if the production line goes to full production as is anticipated.

Which place would you rather work for... a company where things are happening or a place where they are reliving the glory days and lamenting why it will never come back?

And there's a lesson here. The US probably would get a lot better a space program, if they break up the Space Shuttle supply chain than if they keep it. That's because all that talent would move into more useful fields than pursuing cost plus contracts for a moribund agency.

Eisenhower was clearly interested in space reconnaissance, and almost everything that the NSA does in space is something that Eisenhower not only would approve of, but was actively involved with pushing for in terms of rationale to encourage the development of rocketry and satellites.

That said, I don't think he even remotely considered the public relations impact of manned spaceflight nor even the "missile gap" issue that really was more smoke and mirrors than anything else at the time. There certainly was

The Obama administration has a lot of problematic policies related to tech (Solyndra, Yucca Mountain, green energy, etc.) but as far as NASA and space is concerned, they for once have the right idea of buying services from the private sector.

Congress is the group that wants the return to the old NASA, primarily because that keeps the money flowing to the old NASA centers.

And by old NASA centers you mean pork barrel spending in republican districts like, say, Thiokol. At this stage of the game, pork-barrel spending is completely hobbling NASA with ridiculous restrictions like "you have to develop a rocket using technology from from my district" etc. I say spend the money on SpaceX and friends.

Of course advancing space travel sounds good, we all grew up with science fiction. Also, the notion of "leaving the cradle" has a nice ring to it.But the main problem is the incentive. Why should we really go into space? The cradle argument is valid, but not a very big short-term motivator.Instead, I think harvesting resources is the real motivation. Getting materials from the asteroid belt alone would end resource problems pretty quickly. Running out of iridium, indium, platinum... ? These rocks are fille

NASA: They called for support, but could not follow suggestions because the person on the phone was a software person, not a hardware person. They were not authorized to use a screwdriver and reseat a PCI card.

Space-X: Support calls from knowledgable people around the clock and on weekends. Apple employees had their "90 hours a week and loving it" t-shirts. From what I can tell, Space-X is living that sentiment.

The fact is that Apollo was one of our greatness. So is Solar PVs. The problem with private space, like solar PV, is that others are cheating. For example, here in America, federal law PROHIBITS the feds from competing against private space. Yet, with Ares and now with the Senate launch system, that is exactly what they are doing. Add to that the fact that China is dumping on the world their heavily subsidized launches, as well as money manipulated system, and it is just digusting.

Almost half the cost of PVs is that of the silicon used to make them, and the price of silicon went up from $40 to $200 per 1kg in just 5 years. What held back wide acceptance of PVs was the price of silicon - there simply wasn't enough supply to meet demand. Solyndra was creating a business of making non-silicon PVs to bring down prices. There was nothing wrong with the company or their technology, or their business model. What happened was that the price of silicon dropped due to additional supply bec

Mark Whittington is notorious for getting these things so very wrong. For some reason, we're supposed to view SpaceX and related companies as nacent Solyndras waiting to go wrong, but not the companies that will consume vast amounts of federal funding on the space launch system, a heavy lift vehicle that a) isn't planned to do anything for a decade (and may never launch at all!), b) has no payloads planned for it, c) is vastly more expensive than alternatives (such as commercial plus orbital propellant depo

I am unimpressed by your static analysis. Even taking all your points as true (which I don't), what happens when the price of getting material into space is reduced by an order of magnitude? It's certainly likely that we'll see an order of magnitude reduction in the next decade, given the advances made by SpaceX and others.

I don't know about your conclusion either. There is an economic presumption that there is a price/demand curve for spaceflight services where dropping the price for a launch is necessarily going to bring increased demand.

Yes, at a certain point there will be some markets that will grow exponentially with a drop in price, but here is the main question: If you drop the price of the launch in half, will you double (or more) the demand for launch services?

You clearly don't understand how dangerous it is to put someone in space, even with every precaution we can think of. Maybe you've forgotten the 17 deaths that have occurred so far?

Going to space isn't like assaulting Omaha beach. Throwing more cannon fodder out in unsafe vehicles that are likely to fail will not overcome or wear down space and allow later people to make it through.

Why are the lives of astronauts any more precious than those of fishermen?Over a 30 year career, according to dept of labour statistics, 5% will die.If you asked the average trawlerman if they would prefer to make 3 or 4 flights in shirt-sleeve conditions, taking perhaps a week at a time, and make what they would make over 10-15 years, a huge fraction will leap at it, even knowing the risks.

The only reason that 5% of those fishermen die is that they're willing to put their lives in that sort of jeopardy in exchange for the money that they might make. For people with no real skills beyond the ability to perform manual labor, a job on a fishing trawler can be very lucrative because it usually pays a hell of a lot more than minimum wage. If nobody was willing to take the risks, there would be more effort put towards safety...or the boat fishing industry would collapse and we'd only have farmed

Nearly anyone can learn how to work on a fishing boat in less than a week. Learning to pilot a spacecraft is a lot more complicated and few people would take the time and put forth the effort required to develop the necessary skills. We, as a society, value people with rare skills because it's hard to find replacements for those people when needed.

Aside from that, there's the financial aspect of it: If a single trip on a fishing trawler cost half a billion dollars and you had to hire crew and train them f

At one end, it goes up because your launch platform is not reliable enough, and you need to make too many satellites or whatever before one succeeds in being launched.At the other end, it goes up as you've spent too much money on the launcher.

Somewhere in the middle is the sweet spot of minimum cost.If however, you insist that no precaution must be omitted to keep astronauts safe, then the cost rises - perhaps prohibitively.

> If however, you insist that no precaution must be omitted to keep astronauts safe, then the cost rises - perhaps prohibitively.

I never insisted anything of the sort. You're creating straw man arguments.

We've had enough deaths that only an idiot would think that the safety measures in place are overprotective. Fewer safety measures would almost certainly result in more deaths, failed missions and billions of dollars wasted which the theoretical cost-savings of reduced safety measures would almost cert

Nearly anyone can learn how to work on a fishing boat in less than a week. Learning to pilot a spacecraft is a lot more complicated and few people would take the time and put forth the effort required to develop the necessary skills.

Nearly anyone can learn how to work on a space shuttle in less than a week. Here's how the toilet works, here's how you get out after a pad abort, don't get in the way of the flight crew.

And as for the flight crew, most of the time they're pressing a few buttons and watching cockpit displays; NASA gets thousands and thousands of perfectly qualified applicants for those jobs every time they look for new astronauts.

Going to space is, however, more like some of the early flights that were done in aviation. Many of those early aircraft were incredibly flimsy and there were thousands of (non-military combat) related deaths each year in the early years. If anything it is the risk aversion that is to me something that is repugnant, other than the fact that nobody wants to be responsible for the death of somebody else.

In terms of some of those deaths on spaceflight, all 14 of the Shuttle-related deaths could have been prevented had NASA simply followed their own safety guidelines. Apollo 1 was also an unfortunate accident, and something which should have been preventable.... also something which didn't even happen during the course of the actual flight but during a ground test that could have even been inside of a factory. On top of that, the number 17, while technically accurate by figures that NASA claims, is only Americans and not deaths by other people who have attempted spaceflight or deaths by Russian Cosmonauts. It also doesn't include other astronauts who died "on the job" through other means, nor does it include deaths of ground personnel in many countries that can also be related to spaceflight.

Yes, it is dangerous, but so is simply living as a person. You take risks, but you also take measures to try and avoid the most serious injuries and hopefully take safety measures seriously. The trick is to learn from your mistakes and the mistakes of others so you don't repeat them... particularly the most dangerous mistakes.

BTW, in terms of spaceflight, most vehicles have built into them the knowledge and experience of the previous generations of astronauts where those mistakes... especially fatal mistakes... are not likely to be repeated. That is true for anybody trying to push the boundaries of human experience. I certainly would assert that anybody going into space today on board any modern spacecraft is going to be far safer than their predecessors by an order of magnitude or better, and I expect that to improve over time. It certainly isn't a reason to fear going into space.

By far the largest problem in terms of going into space is simply the cost. That is, of course, what the whole point of commercializing spaceflight is all about. There is certainly room to make the trip to space much cheaper.

We should be willing to take risks. But spending hundreds of billions on a manned space program with poorly defined goals only to watch the astronauts burn up in reentry is not the kind of risk we should be taking. You found a very good way of pointing out how little truth there is in claims that dead astronauts' sacrifices pave the way for others.

Until we're willing to make large and meaningful goals and commitments (like a lunar base/observatory) we have little reason to spend money and lives taking unnec

well... not in the strict sense, the fire occurred during a pad test. Challenger was at 48,000 feet, actually lower than the cruise altitude of a certain commercial supersonic airliner. Columbia was doomed before it even reached orbit and the astronauts probably knew it. Could the Americans say they have never lost a man in space and keep a straight face? I would say so.

My motivation for busting America's balls. I hope it get's it head out of its ass.

The result: America learns very quickly to ignore your obnoxious ranting. You are not America's dad, and America does not have to straighten up and be the country you want it to be. Your approval, or lack thereof, isn't relevant.

Considering that Deke Slayton was heavily involved with the construction of the Conestoga rocket system [wikipedia.org] in the 1980's, I'd say he certainly has a foot in both the early days of Apollo (even being one of the original Mercury seven), and in some ways one of the very early pioneers of commercial rocketry. He embodies perhaps the whole of what was once upon a time NASA of a long ago era and what could have become of commercial spaceflight.... if America will only let it happen.

Yeah, the spirit of Deke Slayton would be of particular interest at the moment, and it would be good to invoke him in any such discussion of the intersections of NASA's past glories and what is happening now for spaceflight in America today.

Many different, diametrically-opposed segments of people want to enforce their way of life on everyone else, and knowing that their beliefs are unpopular with voters, seek government power to forcefully do it.

SpaceX is not the only one making it happen. NASA is making it happen WITH SpaceX, SNC, Boeing, Blue Horizon, and Bigelow Aerospace. We need all of these, and it is getting numerous engineers working. The problem is that a large number of neo-cons and a few dems are pushing the SLS nightmare.